You can’t measure what you can’t see. If your tools are limited to measuring volume of mention, share of conversation, +/- sentiment, degree of influence, etc there may be a lot you’re not seeing. In fact, if your current analytics tools aren’t measuring the effect that your social media initiatives have on other communications channels, then you may be attempting marketing optimization while blindfolded.

---

Many of today’s leading social media monitoring and analysis tools are fantastic at providing a cornucopia of social media metrics coupled with exciting data visualizations. They slice and dice social media issue trends, the strength of your brand’s influencers and the power of your brand’s voice across social networks. Some even quantify the reception your multi-channel messaging efforts receive in the social media space.

Yet, how valuable is that insight in relation to your total, multi-channel marketing efforts? Aren’t those metrics really just a single step up in complexity and sophistication from tracking the number of friends, fans and followers?

Brian Solis, in his Social Marketing in Twenty Ten, posts states:

“Measuring sentiment analysis, would-be referrals, and increases in share of voice are entry-level techniques that do not necessarily capture the potential of socialized media channels.”

As organizations begin to harness the true power of social media and strategically incorporate it into the wider marketing plan, it becomes increasingly important to understand and quantify its effects on existing channels and vice versa. Only through understanding the performance relationships between all channels can today’s marketer truly optimize.

Terametric’s measurement and scoring methodology studies the performance of each channel at a molecular level, breaking it down and analyzing its inbound and outbound attributes. As initiatives are deployed in one channel, it begins to affect the performance of inbound and outbound attributes (measured through multiple data points) in other channels. The scores of those other channels automatically adjust in response to their own performance fluctuations, giving marketers an accurate gauge of channel performance correlation.

A note on our scoring methodology from our What the #$%&@ is a Social Intelligence Engine posting:

Many scores can be absolutely meaningless when taken in isolation. Who’s to say that a score of 46 is better than a grade of E? The true value of our social intelligence engine’s scoring methodology is derived from studying the delta or degree of change over time and having sufficient data to correlate that change to specific events, initiatives, campaigns or efforts. True score validity comes from studying and scoring a company and its competitive set to establish a benchmark and then re-scoring periodically to reveal performance fluctuations.

This cursory glance at Terametric’s methodology may create more questions than answers. If so, let us know where you’d like more clarification. We’ll either reach out to you individually or if enough people respond with similar questions, we’ll develop a follow-up posting to address them.

Photo from Molly Orangette

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 3:00 AM by MattC and is filed under Social Media ROI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.